Interactive Multi-Objective Evolutionary Optimization of Software Architectures

During the architectural analysis, abstract artifacts need to be precisely identified and specified in order to efficiently guide the development, evolution and deployment of the overall system. Considering such an early stage, architectural decisions become even more challenging due to the lack of knowledge about the system but, at the same time, they are crucial to fulfill the many quality criteria imposed [12]. Artificial intelligence techniques and, more specifically, metaheuristics, can support software engineers in their decision processes by providing them with effective methods to explore a great deal of software designs, each one determined by a different trade-off among the required quality aspects. Such a scenario can be viewed as one of the goals of the search-based software engineering (SBSE) field[14], in which optimization techniques are applied to the resolution of software engineering (SE) tasks conveniently reformulated as search problems. However, solving human-centered activities in a fully automated way seems to be unrealistic, especially for those related to the analysis phase. Certainly, trying to capture the richness of human knowledge only by means of software metrics still represents an unresolved matter to the SE community [32]. Hence, most of the evaluation methods proposed at the architectural level strongly rely on the expert's judgment [10], making extremely difficult to precisely formulate a quantitative fitness function. Given the relevance of the software architect for the design process, searchbased approaches should benefit from his/her knowledge and expertise in order to address the optimization problem in the same way s/he would do it. Interactive optimization [21] constitutes a compelling paradigm here.